How this is going to begin

From Firefly to Wikileaks, the Liberal Revolution as Conspiracy Revealed

In Firefly, (Joss Whedon, 2002), the TV series and movie that blended Western with Sci-Fi and features the best use of a Baldwin since, well, ever, rebellious narratives make an interesting appearance. The main characters were on the losing side in a defensive war against an expansionist political entity known as “The Alliance,” which, at the start of the storyline, is the ultimate force in the solar system. Multiple aesthetic cues evoke the Civil War showdown between the Yankees and the Rebels, but without that whole embarrassing slavery thing (the series protagonist not only has black friends, he has a black co-star).

Now that the war is lost, the two ex-rebels go Han Soloing about the star system in a space freighter, smuggling stuff and doing things with the help of the typical unlikely cast of crewmembers. Aside from providing what may be the best anti-authoritarian line from B-Grade film since Charlton Heston’s 1973 “Soylent Green is people!” (the new titleholder is “I aim to misbehave,” delivered by Nathan Fillion with a sexy sneer), there’s hardly anything novel in this embarrassingly amusing series and film.

What we find instead is a common liberal archetype of revolution as conspiracy revealed. Besides the authorities and other criminals, the only bad guys in the Firefly star system are known as “reavers.” Well beyond Faulkneresque, these reavers are ultraviolent, marauding freaks whom the movie reveals to be the accidental product of a secret government program to engineer perfectly happy, perfectly obedient citizens. The attempt to remove free will unpredictably turns them into psychopaths bent only on destruction. Denoument is achieved by broadcasting this suppressed truth, with the help of a rogue hacker, throughout the system.

The assumption is that once people realize the truth, they will rise up and the old regime will fall. The advantage of this model of rebellion is that it can be singlehandedly executed by a lone individual or a small group (making things easier for the scriptwriters) and that it never requires the building of collective power or the negation of deeper structures of domination (making things easier for the governments whose citizens regularly consume this storyline). Nearly every book or movie that deals with conspiracy and protagonizes rebellion makes at least some use of this model of revolution.

The ongoing controversy involving Wikileaks and the trials and tribulations of Julian Assange provide yet another test case for the effectiveness of this model in the real world. It would be a hilaroius sequel to Firefly in which our hotshot space pilot were arrested as a sex-offender while all the lower class Alliance citizens negatively impacted by the reavers, which is to say by their government’s policies, tsked and shook their heads and debated whether such openness were harmful to national security.

The real secret that liberal discourse hides, the great conspiracy, revolves around the nature of knowledge itself. I’m not sure if Foucault’s analysis of knowledge-power is adequate to this situation, because what is at stake is not merely the categorization and mobilization of knowledge. Such a paradigmatic approach discards the possibility of subversive agency or externality to power. While we are presented with the interaction of fragments, this is a productive interaction, such that contradiction, and thus the need for suppression, is minimized.

At every moment the leaked State Department cables are being presented within the category of policy, never translated out of the strategic language of government nor even the institutional dialects in which they were written, so we are not dealing with pure and external facts that challenge a reigning paradigm but with a dispositif’s own descriptions of its operations.

So far, vanilla. The controversy that is playing out in real life does not reflect a paradigmatic conflict. However, the debate centers around the question, “Should we know these things?” The psychological underpinnings of this question reveal that, in a way, everyone already knew that the military was running death squads, that every government everywhere is conniving and petty, that Israel was up to no good, and so on and so forth. And they knew only so far as this knowledge already belonged to the hive mind of society. When Wikileaks released the cables, hardly anyone acted surprised.

Rather, there was a spontaneous transition from the debate (which admittedly had faded into the background years ago) about whether the US military is torturing people to a debate about whether we should know the US military is torturing people. No double-take, no stuttering, no process of transition, but a smooth replacement of one argument with another, despite the contradictory bases of those arguments.

As a great part of society from all classes argue in favor of the compartmentalization of this classified knowledge within the authorized cells of the hive mind, it becomes apparent that we are not living and struggling in a terrain where rational debate is possible. What we are faced with, actually, is a society suffering from cognitive dissonance, that will replace its alibis as quickly as an alcoholic.

I stumbled across a test case on a much smaller scale that furnished identical results when an acquaintance who teaches a university course showed me his students’ responses to the question, “Is it okay to be a luddite?” Of about twenty responses, all but two answered in the negative, and the overwhelming majority of these argued that it was ethically wrong to be a luddite because “technology” was imposed on society and anyone who didn’t use it would be excluded. Only a handful bothered to claim that “technology” made our lives better. In other words, for most people right and wrong are pragmatic measurements of their antagonism or invisibility towards the power structures that can exclude them from society. Thus, if power is indeed reproduced by everyone, it is done so unevenly and in such a way that it exists as an intimate externality to each individual’s free will, like an abusive father for whom one is constantly making excuses.

This behavior suggests a primacy of social relations to which discourse is subservient. In general, people believe what they have to believe in order to get along. The ideal is to live in accordance with your beliefs, but if your life and your actions are disciplined and limited by the State, it will be easier to tailor your beliefs to the life you are already living. This process of building an alibi is in fact a central movement in the identity-formation known as “growing up.”

In some cases, the operation is an easy one. How many people would be able to find out on their own that people living outside of the State did not lead “nasty, brutish and short” lives? Other cases, such as the nature of the police, are harder to cover up, because people encounter contradictions to the official line in their day to day life. This is why you only have a few movies or news programs showing savages living in misery, and a damnable flood of cultural production that introduces “the corrupt cop,” “the good cop,” and the racialized or lumpen criminal in order to help the citizenry explain away the troubling episodes they may witness daily.

The idea of a continuous synthesizing between knowledge and power without any externality is contradicted by the occasional evidence of the world or the body asserting themselves against the discourses that attempt to mold them. Cognitive dissonance, regardless of the paradigm it is understood within, comes with disorders, perturbations, bad humours, however you want to call them, that demonstrate there is a limit to the ability of the ordering of knowledge to enlist us in the universal reproduction of power.

We can attest, therefore, to a world that is independent from knowledge but never separate from it. Seen in this light, the inability of knowledge of the government leaks to provoke substantive resistance reveals a particular relationship to knowledge within democratic society. Through the device of free speech, democracy has already accomplished the alienation of beliefs from actions. By allowing freedom of expression in exchange for the prohibition of free action, democracy expropriates us from our opinions and disciplines us to believe in anything as long as we act on nothing. This is a qualititative shift from the days of the Bogomils, the Cathars, and the Taborites, when heresy was the greatest threat to established order. Today, heresy is passé.

Therefore, within the current arrangement of power, it becomes necessary to distinguish between information and knowledge, with the former being the alienated husk of the latter. Xabier Barandiaran provides a useful analysis of the mining and acculturation of information as code to be plugged into developing socio-technological apparati. In this model, information is inert when not plugged into the mechanical operation it was encoded for.

So, when government documents are leaked, it is something like the spilling of God’s seed on this barren and fruitless earth—the faithful among us go running after those out-of-place tadpoles, fishing them all into a great basket so they can be returned to the only realm where they can find any use and thus where they have any meaning. Government secrets, the good citizens argue, belong with the government.

Knowledge, as opposed to information, requires interaction with the world, as mediated through symbol and discourse. Mediation here is not bad, it is not the stand-in for alienation, as though world and body were two separate entities, stumbling blindly towards some reunion (I recall the Ted Hughes poem “A Childish Prank”) and separated only by language and other mediating instruments—this is the image bequeathed to us by what has unfortunately been the predominant current in anarchist philosophy over the last decades (perhaps since Fredy Perlman, who was marvelous regardless).

Rather, knowledge, which is always self-knowledge, requires a symbolic dimension, just as the physical phenomenon of reflection (synonym of contemplation) suggests both the possibilities of self-awareness and of symbolic representation. Thus, knowledge is not a pure body finding a pure world because world and body are one. Knowledge is the world, as the body, discovering itself. Therefore, when the State has expropriated the body from the world, knowledge becomes obsolete and the body becomes a cog that can either process information according to the code or not. By opting out, it is not attacking this process, simply removing itself from the flows of information and value (monetary as well as affective), whether by not going to work, not going to the pep rally, not laughing or sighing when the rest of the audience does.

And there are limits on opting out as well. One may survive only by serving as a conduit for these flows. By not going to work, by not going to the movies, one removes oneself from the community of commodities and affective allegiances to those commodities that, in the capitalist world, is the only means of reproduction, of survival.

Power, one might say, is not everywhere, but nowhere. This is a universe of powerlessness, in which power can only be born in a singularity such as is the seizing of agency, which in this universe is always a rebellious act. The idea that information could be subversive implies that people are already taking action in their lives, and new information would direct their actions in new directions. This never plays out because people are not taking action but serving as conduits (with differing degrees of enthusiasm) and transforming the code that passes before them into mechanical operation and back into code.

Events such as Wikileaks threaten the alibi but not the fundamental activity being covered up. New or different information cannot interrupt this mechanical process because it does not address people’s relationship to that information (which is one of alienation) or their essential powerlessness and passivity. In the end, all the subversive information in the world is only saying one thing: “You are powerless. You are powerless. You are powerless. You are powerless.” Learning this does not change a thing. It was already obvious. This is why people needed the alibis in the first place.

A revolutionary understanding of the nature of information is actually present in the Matrix trilogy, speaking of code. The significance of this film’s resonance should not be overlooked—it spoke directly to the alienation of millions of young and not so young people, touching them at the very level of identity, mediated, in most cases, by new aesthetic trends, but in no few instances by such outbursts as public shootings. When the first film ends, Neo informs the machine world that “Now, I’m going to hang up this phone, and I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see.”

This threat promises the typical liberal revolution as conspiracy revealed. But the continuation of the trilogy exposes the revelation’s impotence: the Matrix does not come tumbling down just because people have discovered its existence. The discovery only serves to strengthen those who are already rebelling; everyone else must still unplug and arm themselves, one by one. And looking back to the previous line at the end of the first film, we find that it was the genre and not this particular script that gave us these expectations: “I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end, I came here to tell you how this is going to begin […] I’m going to show them a world without you […] A world where anything is possible.”

Revealing the conspiracy has its value, but the conspiracy itself is not the framework for the evil authority, simply its alibi. Unmasking it can only be a beginning.

7 thoughts on “How this is going to begin”

Firefly fail. In the end of the movie serenity, The Opertitive states that the alliance is weakened, but still powerful and still out for revenge. That is, there was no revolution within the alliance planets. It was a slight to them, they got egg on there face, but life goes on for the people of the allaince without a change in institutions.

A heavily modified version of this article will be reposted here shortly, to clarify how the archetype in question squares with the actual plot conclusion (see above comment) and to better develop the question of Foucault.

While I agree that the Liberal Revolution as Conspiracy Revealed is one of the dominant culture’s prevailing myths these days, it is not the motive behind WikiLeaks. I direct you to these strategy papers written by Julian Assange: http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf

Assange makes it clear that he is not too concerned with what happens with the leaks after they’re publicized. He’s not presuming that concerned citizens will necessarily take action. What he’s trying to do is establish such a large flow of continual leaks that the organizations that depend on secrecy will be faced with a stark choice: to begin conducting their operations transparently or else, to curtail further leaking, attenuate their internal communications down to a point where they will no longer be able to function as an organization. WikiLeaks is designed to be an attack on all institutions of power that rely on secrecy to hide their unethical activities from a public that would otherwise disapprove. These institutions appear to fear disclosure, so perhaps they perceive WikiLeaks as a genuine threat. They certainly spend a lot of money on public relations, creating lies and spin and distraction, which seems to indicate that public opinion has a strategic value to them. Maybe these institutions could not get away with what they’re doing if leaks roused the ire of the public. Or perhaps you are right that the public is so disempowered, resigned, and in denial, that even if WikiLeaks were to triumph, forcing power to become completely transparent, nothing would change because so few are willing and able do change anything based on this information.

Well, the updated version still hasn’t been posted, but since the changes are relevant to the subsequent piece (“Kafka Reloaded”) I’m just posting it all here, without formatting, and hope it eventually gets changed

How this is going to begin
From Firefly to Wikileaks, the Liberal Revolution as Conspiracy Revealed

In Firefly, (Joss Whedon, 2002), the TV series and movie that blended Western with Sci-Fi and features the best use of a Baldwin since, well, ever, rebellious narratives make an interesting appearance. The main characters were on the losing side in a defensive war against an expansionist political entity known as “The Alliance,” which, at the start of the storyline, is the ultimate force in the solar system. Multiple aesthetic cues evoke the Civil War showdown between the Yankees and the Rebels, but without that whole embarrassing slavery thing (the series protagonist not only has black friends, he has a black co-star).

Now that the war is lost, the two ex-rebels go Han Soloing about the star system in a space freighter, smuggling stuff and doing things with the help of the typical unlikely cast of crewmembers. Aside from providing what may be the best anti-authoritarian line from B-Grade film since Charlton Heston’s 1973 “Soylent Green is people!” (the new titleholder is “I aim to misbehave,” delivered by Nathan Fillion with a sexy sneer), there’s hardly anything novel in this embarrassingly amusing series and film.

What we find instead is a common liberal archetype of revolution as conspiracy revealed. Besides the authorities and other criminals, the only bad guys in the Firefly star system are known as “reavers.” Well beyond Faulkneresque, these reavers are ultraviolent, marauding freaks whom the movie reveals to be the accidental product of a secret government program to engineer perfectly happy, perfectly obedient citizens. The attempt to remove free will unpredictably turns them into psychopaths bent only on destruction. Denoument is achieved by broadcasting this suppressed truth, with the help of a rogue hacker, throughout the system.

The assumption is that once people realize the truth, they will rise up and the old regime will fall. All it takes is the one boy shouting that the emperor’s got no clothes. The advantage of this model of rebellion is that it can be singlehandedly executed by a lone individual or a small group (making things easier for the scriptwriters) and that it never requires the building of collective power or the negation of deeper structures of domination (making things easier for the governments whose citizens regularly consume this storyline). Innumberable books and movies that deal with conspiracy and protagonize rebellion make at least some use of this model of revolution, from law enforcement dramas to fantasy epics. Typically, the story ends with only the expectation that everything will change and not the portrayal of this change, as social transformation tends to be outside mass culture’s imaginary. Or in the case of films like Conspiracy Theory, the protagonist wins the protection of another already existing elite agency, and nothing in the appearance of the world needs to change.

(This absence of social transformation in the popular imaginary is so significant that it deserves a paragraph’s digression. Unlike our medieval comrades, we have no “world turned upside down,” which is to say absolutely no common idea of what we want, however absurd the image may be. From Star Wars to Avatar, the most we can imagine is the return to a prior order; but with the loss of historical memory, what prior order could we even go back to? For this reason, it may well be more revolutionary to create a new cultural commons out of works like bolo’bolo than to rob banks—though of course if one were to exclude the other, such activity would become immediately self-defeating.)

As an archetype, the revolution as conspiracy revealed is so common as to have become self-conscious. Its more recent manifestations evince what I believe is a new quality in this storyline: cynicism. In the Firefly movie, the assumptions of liberal revolution are incorporated into the plot, but a cynical postscript, which potentially signals an erosion of liberal values long underway, reveals that the attempt to destroy the Alliance by unmasking it failed to bring about a significant change in the end.

The ongoing controversy involving Wikileaks and the trials and tribulations of Julian Assange provide a test case for the effectiveness of this model in the real world, showing that even the cynicism of Firefly is understated. It would be a hilarious sequel to Firefly in which our hotshot space pilot were arrested as a sex-offender while all the lower class Alliance citizens negatively impacted by the reavers, which is to say by their government’s policies, tsked and shook their heads and debated whether such openness were harmful to national security.

The real secret that liberal discourse hides, the great conspiracy, revolves around the nature of knowledge itself. Knowledge is not power, not in the way the freemasons mean. On the level of specific careers and strategic iniatives, it is a great blow to world governments that their secrets have been published far and wide across the internet. But as Foucault points out in the “Method” chapter of The History of Sexuality, “silence and secrecy are a shelter for power, anchoring its prohibitions; but they also loosen its hold and provide for relatively obscure areas of tolerance.” Now that these secrets have been collectivized, their maintenance has also been collectivized.

Previously, public (which is to say mediatic) debate had focused on whether, for example, torture and death squads were in effect, what constituted torture and acceptable norms of warfare. The moment the leak becomes public, the prior debate becomes moot, and the new question is, “Should we know these things?”

On every level, both the public and popular responses contradict the liberal model of knowledge and confirm an initial interpretation of Foucault’s model thereof. With the loss of secrecy, there must arise a broader involvement in and disciplining of the field that was previously obscured. The conservatives and moderates in the debate argue for the reinforcement of this obscurity, and increased state capacities for the keeping of secrets. The progressives, even including some of the radicals in Anonymous, argue for the democratic autogestion of the information now sequestered as state secrets, which would necessarily be accompanied by a further humanization of state methods.

The psychological underpinnings of the new question reveal that, in a way, everyone already knew that the military was running death squads, that every government everywhere is conniving and petty, that Israel was up to no good, and so on and so forth. And they knew only so far as this knowledge already belonged to the hive mind of society. When Wikileaks released the cables, hardly anyone acted surprised.

Rather, there was a spontaneous transition from the debate (which admittedly had faded into the background years ago) about whether the US military is torturing people to a debate about whether we should know the US military is torturing people. No double-take, no stuttering, no process of transition, but a smooth replacement of one argument with another, despite the contradictory bases of those arguments.

The spontaneity and rapidity of this response suggests a phenomenon at work that does not fit within Foucault’s idea of power/knowledge. If society really were so fragmented, if the microscopic and macroscopic, or rather the strategic and tactical, were really only united by a mutual conditioning and not some higher order, how could a field of knowledge so suddenly revealed be so quickly digested by such a large part of the population? In the case of sodomy presented by Foucault, what had once been wrapped in secrecy was disciplined by newly evolving sciences, in a fragmented and immanent way as tactics and strategies evolved over a period of decades to extend power relations into a newly emerging field.

However, when a body of knowledge is suddenly opened in a way that was not possible in Foucault’s time, and a great part of society jumps to invest it, it is hard to see society as such a fragmented thing with no unifying strategy.

As a great part of society from all classes argue in favor of the compartmentalization of this classified knowledge within the authorized cells of the hive mind, it becomes apparent that we are not living and struggling in a terrain where rational debate is possible, as the liberals would have us believe. But neither can we claim to inhabit a field of fragmented power relations lacking a centralized State. What we are faced with is a society unified by cognitive dissonance, that will replace its alibis as quickly as an alcoholic.

I stumbled across a test case on a much smaller scale, that furnished identical results, when an acquaintance who teaches a university course showed me his students’ responses to the question, “Is it okay to be a luddite?” Of about twenty responses, all but two answered in the negative, and the overwhelming majority of these argued that it was ethically wrong to be a luddite because “technology” was imposed on society and anyone who didn’t use it would be excluded. Only a handful bothered to claim that “technology” made our lives better. In other words, for most people right and wrong are pragmatic measurements of their antagonism or invisibility towards a relatively unified power that can exclude them from society. Thus, if power is indeed reproduced by everyone, it is done so unevenly and in such a way that it exists as an intimate externality to each individual’s free will, like an abusive father for whom one is constantly making excuses.

This behavior suggests a primacy of social relations to which discourse is subservient. In general, people believe what they have to believe in order to get along. The ideal is to live in accordance with your beliefs, but if your life and your actions are disciplined and limited by the State, it will be easier to tailor your beliefs to the life you are already living. This process of building an alibi is in fact a central movement in the identity-formation known as “growing up.”

In some cases, the operation is an easy one. How many people would be able to find out on their own that people living outside of the State did not lead “nasty, brutish and short” lives? Other cases, such as the nature of the police, are harder to cover up, because people encounter contradictions to the official line in their day to day life. This is why you only have a few movies or news programs showing savages living in misery, and a damnable flood of cultural production that introduces “the corrupt cop,” “the good cop,” and the racialized or lumpen criminal in order to help the citizenry explain away the troubling episodes they may witness daily.

The idea of a continuous synthesizing between knowledge and power without any externality is contradicted by the occasional evidence of the world or the body asserting themselves against the discourses that attempt to mold them. Cognitive dissonance, regardless of the paradigm it is understood within, comes with disorders, perturbations, bad humours, however you want to call them, that demonstrate there is a limit to the ability of the ordering of knowledge to enlist us in the universal reproduction of power.

We can attest, therefore, to a world that is independent from knowledge but never separate from it. Seen in this light, the inability of knowledge of the government leaks to provoke substantive resistance reveals a particular relationship to knowledge within democratic society. Through the device of free speech, democracy has already accomplished the alienation of beliefs from actions. By allowing freedom of expression in exchange for the prohibition of free action, democracy expropriates us from our opinions and disciplines us to believe in anything as long as we act on nothing. This is a qualititative shift from the days of the Bogomils, the Cathars, and the Taborites, when heresy was the greatest threat to established order. Today, heresy is passé.

Therefore, within the current arrangement of power, it becomes necessary to distinguish between information and knowledge, with the former being the alienated husk of the latter. Xabier Barandiaran provides a useful analysis of the mining and acculturation of information as code to be plugged into developing socio-technological apparati. In this model, information is inert when not plugged into the mechanical operation it was encoded for.

So, when government documents are leaked, it is something like the spilling of God’s seed on this barren and fruitless earth—the faithful among us go running after those out-of-place tadpoles, fishing them all into a great basket so they can be returned to the only realm where they can find any use and thus where they have any meaning. Government secrets, the good citizens argue, belong with the government.

Knowledge, as opposed to information, requires interaction with the world, as mediated through symbol and discourse. Mediation here is not bad, it is not the stand-in for alienation, as though world and body were two separate entities, stumbling blindly towards some reunion (I recall the Ted Hughes poem “A Childish Prank”) and separated only by language and other mediating instruments—this is the image bequeathed to us by what has unfortunately been the predominant current in anarchist philosophy over the last decades (perhaps since Fredy Perlman, who was marvelous regardless).

Rather, knowledge, which is always self-knowledge, requires a symbolic dimension, just as the physical phenomenon of reflection (synonym of contemplation) suggests both the possibilities of self-awareness and of symbolic representation. Thus, knowledge is not a pure body finding a pure world because world and body are inseparable. Knowledge is the world, as the body, discovering itself. Therefore, when the State has expropriated the body from the world, knowledge becomes obsolete and the body becomes a cog that can either process information according to the code or not. By opting out, it is not attacking this process, simply removing itself from the flows of information and value (monetary as well as affective), whether by not going to work, not going to the pep rally, not laughing or sighing when the rest of the audience does.

And there are limits on opting out as well. One may survive only by serving as a conduit for these flows. By not going to work, by not going to the movies, one removes oneself from the community of commodities and affective allegiances to those commodities that, in the capitalist world, is the only means of reproduction, of survival.

Power, one might say, is not everywhere, but nowhere. This is a universe of powerlessness, in which power can only be born in a singularity such as is the seizing of agency, which in this universe is always a rebellious act. The idea that information could be subversive implies that people are already taking action in their lives, and new information would direct their actions in new directions. This never plays out because people are not taking action but serving as conduits (with differing degrees of enthusiasm) and transforming the code that passes before them into mechanical operation and back into code.

Events such as Wikileaks threaten the alibi but not the fundamental activity being covered up. New or different information cannot interrupt this mechanical process because it does not address people’s relationship to that information (which is one of alienation) or their essential powerlessness and passivity. In the end, all the subversive information in the world is only saying one thing: “You are powerless. You are powerless. You are powerless. You are powerless.” Learning this does not change a thing. It was already obvious. This is why people needed the alibis in the first place.

A revolutionary understanding of the nature of information is actually present in the Matrix trilogy, speaking of code. The significance of this film’s resonance should not be overlooked—it spoke directly to the alienation of millions of young and not so young people, touching them at the very level of identity, mediated, in most cases, by new aesthetic trends, but in no few instances by such outbursts as public shootings. When the first film ends, Neo informs the machine world that “Now, I’m going to hang up this phone, and I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see.”

This threat promises the typical liberal revolution as conspiracy revealed. But the continuation of the trilogy exposes the revelation’s impotence: the Matrix does not come tumbling down just because people have discovered its existence. The discovery only serves to strengthen those who are already rebelling; everyone else must still unplug and arm themselves, one by one. And looking back to the previous line at the end of the first film, we find that it was the genre and not this particular script that gave us these expectations: “I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end, I came here to tell you how this is going to begin […] I’m going to show them a world without you […] A world where anything is possible.”

Revealing the conspiracy has its value insofar as it sharpens the fighting capacity or increases the connectivity of those who are already in rebellion. But the conspiracy itself is not the framework for the evil authority, simply its alibi. Unmasking it can only be a beginning.